How to Fake a Trojan War: The Perplexing Case of the “First Pagan Historian” 

A lecture by Dr. Frederic Nolan Clark, Associate Professor of Classics, University of Southern California. 

 The annals of literary history are replete with examples of formerly famous books that have fallen into obscurity and neglect. But few have experienced as marked a reversal of fortune, or as ignominious a fall, as Dares the Phrygian’s History of the Destruction of Troy. Though scarcely read today, even by classicists, the Destruction of Troy was required reading for centuries throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe. Dares made an audacious claim: he presented himself as an eyewitness to the Trojan War. He promised—in arrestingly simple prose—to deliver the facts and just the facts about what really happened at Troy. His battlefield dispatches contained precise casualty figures, and made no mention of the gods or other mythical phenomena; he said nothing about the Trojan Horse. Dares’ text circulated in Latin, in a version supposedly translated by the text’s “discoverer,” the Roman historian Cornelius Nepos. Of course, the real Nepos had never laid eyes upon the book, just as “Dares” had never been a real eyewitness to the Trojan War. While the motives of the actual author of this fake remain enigmatic, he fooled a millennium of readers into labeling him nothing less than the first pagan to write history. This talk will trace the rise and fall of Dares’ fortunes, from antiquity to the eighteenth century, and in doing so will pose some fundamental questions that we still grapple with today. Just where is the line between truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, history and myth? And how have readers and interpreters across millennia drawn—and blurred—the boundaries between these categories?

Sponsored by the Minor in Global Premodern Studies, CI’s Programs in Anthropology, Art & Art History, and History, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, with funds provided courtesy of CI’s Instructionally Related Activities (IRA) Committee and the offices of the President and Provost.

Global Premodern Studies Public Lecture Series - News Releases - CSU Channel Islands (csuci.edu)